Friday, November 22, 2013

Friday, November 22, 2013 - No comments

Anticipating Winter - Part Two (The Locals)

For most of the other women in my neighbourhood, winter preparations involve things like tomatoes and peppers rather than plaster and paint.  Last week I read an article in an inflight magazine called “How Anatolian Women Prepare for Winter,” mostly revolving around the edibles that are currently being stockpiled in cupboards around the country.  A far cry from a Pinterest board of new and intriguing ways to use pumpkin, most of my neighbours’ autumn to-do lists are more about making the most of the current harvest and keeping veggies on the table through the winter when fresh ones are scarce.

Tomato paste is a key ingredient in a lot of Turkish recipes, and the homemade variety is definitely preferred over the store-bought kind.  At the end of the summer, women load up on kilos and kilos of tomatoes (either from the pazar or their own fields) and then the tomatoes are chopped, strained, and either dried in the sun for a few days (if you live in the village and have the luxury of a flat roof) or boiled on the stove (if you’re a city dweller confined to an apartment) and then stored in glass jars (or sometimes pop bottles) to be used all winter long.

Olives are a must on the Turkish breakfast table.  The olive grove behind our house has been picked bare, the olives now being cured in large reused plastic water bottles full of brine, olive oil and thyme which will be kept in the dark through the coming months.  Last year I got to help with my first olive harvest.  Olives are high on my list of foods I’d love to avoid for the rest of my life, but I sure did enjoy climbing all those trees!

An Anatolian woman’s pantry will be bursting with canning jars at this point in the season.  Pickled cucumbers, peppers, carrots, onions, tomatoes and cabbage line the shelves.  Homemade jam comes in every variety from “familiar” flavours like strawberry and apricot to more “creative” flavours like carrot, rose and, yes, even eggplant.  (No joke - it’s found on the shelf of any big market.)  Turks are also big fans of pekmez, a cousin of molasses made from either grapes or mulberries.  A great antidote for anemia, it’s known as an “internal heater” that will keep you warm and free of colds during the chilly months.  A few years ago I got to witness “pekmez making week” in Cappadocia - I marveled at the arm muscles it took to be able to stir the grapes for seven or eight hours in a massive cauldron over a campfire!

Pickled everything
Buckets of boiled grapes for making pekmez

In the warmer months leading up to winter, women here hollow out red and green peppers and eggplant and then string them up like colourful necklaces on the roof or balcony to dry.  These will then be stored in a dry place and pulled out during the winter and stuffed with a mixture of rice and spices (and sometimes meat, pine nuts or black currants) to make dolma.  (My favourite!)  

Dried peppers and eggplant
 A whole lot of delicious dolma
Most evening meals here begin with a bowl of steaming soup, and tarhana çorbası is a winter must.  A variable mix of veggies (usually onions, red peppers, carrots and an assortment of greens) are cooked and pureed.  Yogurt is added, then a whole lot of flour, and the mixture is kneaded until it forms a soft dough.  The dough is separated into balls and left to dry for several days, then broken down into marble-sized bits and dried some more.  When it’s dried through, it’s crushed into flakes, either by hand or in a blender, and then stored in jars to be made into soup at a later date.  I only recently learned how involved the process of making tarhana is, so I shall be more appreciative from here on out when a bowl is placed in front of me. 

While most families will buy several loaves of bread (think French bread) a day from the neighbourhood bakery, a homemade flatbread called yufka is also a popular accompaniment to dinner.  When the weather is nice, groups of women head outside (in our case, to the olive grove out back) and set up their bread-making assembly line.  Dough is mixed in large plastic tubs and then rolled out paper thin on a low wooden table.  The large round yufka is then cooked on a saç (a huge concave metal pan) over a fire.  After a long day’s work, each woman will go home with a stack of flaky yufka that will be covered with a cloth and stored for up to a month.  Come dinner time, they just flick it with drops of water until it softens and, voila - bread.  (And if I’m lucky enough to happen to pass by on bread making day, the offer always comes for me to go grab some cheese from the house and have them fry me up some fresh gözleme.  Yum!)

Last but not least comes the category which I’d call “fruit snacks.”  (Like Fruit Roll Ups, but way healthier!)  People who spend the summer in their hometowns out east often have vineyards and fruit orchards.  Those with grapes and mulberries will boil and strain them, then set the juice out to thicken in the sun and use it to make things like pestil (thin fruit leather) and cevizli sucuk (literally “walnut sausage”), a long stick of “fruit snack” with nuts inside.  They’ll also do up a bunch of strings of nuts, grapes and chunks of the fruit leather to be pulled out, along with dried mulberries, for snacks when guests come over.  
Cevizli sucuk
I have so much respect for the hardworking women around me and definitely love being able to partake of the fruits of their labour.  Since moving here, I’ve learned to do without most packaged food and make pretty much everything from scratch (I’ve come a long way from the days of importing Bisquick for pancakes, let me tell you...) but I’ve still got nothing on them!